Doing It Wright

In 2003, the Wright brothers’ historic designs will take off again.

A group of volunteers has spent Saturday mornings for 18 years planning and assembling a full-scale replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer, the vessel of man’s first powered and controlled flight. The model moved here in November from Gardena for engine testing.

Upon completion in March, the replica will be shipped to a NASA base near San Jose for wind tunnel testing before debuting at the Federal Aviation Administration Flight Deck Museum in Hawthorne. After test data is obtained, a second plane--already in the early design and building stages--will fly Dec. 17, 2003, commemorating the 100th anniversary flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

“I am not worried,” said Fred Culick, 63, of Altadena, who plans to serve as the pilot, controlling the plane while lying on his stomach. “We have a lot of data about how these things fly.”

Culick, a Cal Tech aeronautics professor, met with other volunteers in 1978 after another replica burned in a fire at the San Diego Aerospace Museum. Members from the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics secured the plans from the Smithsonian and committed to building another model with a 40-foot wingspan reinforced with piano wire, cotton wing coverings, spruce propellers and a double rudder.

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With a March deadline to complete the work, members spent a few hours Saturday rigging the cross wires, balancing the engine, fiddling with propellers and applying final touches.

The flight will be a key West Coast celebration of the Wright brothers’ historic flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C. It took the brothers less than a year to build their biplane.

“The Wright brothers are getting more visibility with 2003,” said Marilyn Ramsey, a graphic designer at the Federal Aviation Administration’s local headquarters in Hawthorne. “It’s an ongoing odyssey.”

Many of the volunteers, mostly aerospace engineers, have spent their lives building things that go far and fast: rockets, space capsules, jumbo jets.

Now they want to fly low, maybe a few meters, and slow, at Wilbur and Orville Wright’s pace of 30 mph. The Wrights’ plane covered only 120 feet in its 12 seconds aloft.

“The point is not to do aerobatics,” Culick said. “It’s not a macho thing. The point is to re-create the flight of this airplane.”

The project has gone through dozens of volunteers and $20,000 in insurance money from the San Diego fire. There are about $100,000 of donated materials and in-kind donations from Able Corp., International Die Casting, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell International, TRW and others in the replica.

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Just like the eccentric Wright brothers, volunteers are not dissuaded by the long road to takeoff. People were suspicious of the first pilots.

“If I had told you [that] me and my brother built an interstellar spacecraft in our backyard, you would think I had sprinkled too much sugar on my Post Toasties,” said crew member Steve Shackelford, 50, of Walnut, who is an air traffic control supervisor at the Hawthorne Airport. “That was what it was like [for the Wright brothers]. Nobody thought it would fly.”

The Yorba Linda crew will make some changes to the flying model to make it safer, more durable and easier to fly than the 1903 Flyer. That one is dubbed a “near replica.”

It will replicate the 1903 Flyer in design, size and appearance. Subtle differences such as cable fastenings, materials and the engine--an old Volkswagen motor will substitute--will differ.

“It’s what we call stand-off scale,” said TRW engineer Jack Cherne, 76, of Santa Monica, who was a project engineer on the Apollo project. “Someone who stands 10 feet away will think it’s the real thing.”

Though they pioneered flight, Wilbur and Orville never had a Web site. Their followers do at https://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~johnlatz/1903.html.